Meadows, Illinois
by pyrebi
Summary: It's not your Sunday-school kinda God. Not at all. A story about the opening events of 4.01 Lazarus Rising.


Have a little fic for 4.01 _Lazarus Rising_, if you please! I was interested in Dean's resurrection and its circumstances, so this is what fell out of my head. When I was writing "Palo Alto Normality Blues," I discovered that I rather liked the ten-drabble sets, so this fic is also written as series of ten drabble of exactly 100 words each. I hope that you enjoy.

--

**Meadows, Illinois**

_(not your sunday-school kinda god)_

--

Missy yaps at Anna's heels as she walks past the doghouse. Stupid little bitchy Pomeranian. Didn't matter that Mom loves the thing _so much_—once the beast started pissing on the carpet, out it'd gone.

It's a nice day near the end of May, not too hot, so she decides to walk to work. Ketchum's is Grandpa's store, and he's got her working the morning shift because of his arthritis. It's not so bad for scratch money, and it does okay business. After all, there's no other place to get milk unless you wanna drive the ten miles to Pontiac.

--

Anna spends the first half of the morning the way she does every other: reorganizing the shop. Grandpa likes things a _certain way_, but his _certain way_ is cracked. So she spends an hour every day putting the hottest sellers in front, the dusty cans of Alpo in the back. More streamlined, you know.

After that she skims the girlie mags that Grandpa stocks. He always says they're for the farm hands that stop in, but she thinks the old man might have ulterior motives. She just contemplates how much a wax like that cover chick is sporting must hurt.

--

At 10:43 a.m. the little bell above the door jingles and in slides this big dude. He grabs a couple bottles of water and shoves a few wrinkled ones at her. Once he has his change, he heads back out to a black monster of a car. A guy in a trucker cap is sitting in the passenger seat, and she can see someone's head propped against a back window. The guy in the back has something dark clumping some of his hair together, and he's not moving.

_Not even a little bit_, Anna realizes as the car pulls away.

--

August rolls through like a hot breath, and then it's September 2nd and Anna heads off for her first day of class at Heartland Community College. She's had a year off since high school, but her dad is bitching about her getting a decent job and moving out. She figures that this'll buy her two years at least.

Now that she's going to school, though, Ketchum's doesn't open 'til the early afternoon. Grandpa just can't get himself to work in the mornings like he used to, though she thinks he could try a little bit harder. Hell, she'd managed it.

--

Anna is back from her morning Spanish class already when it happens. One minute she's tapping the lid of the jelly jar against the counter, the next she's flat on her back, blood mixing with preserves on the linoleum. There's a two-inch gash on her arm and every window in the house has shattered inward. For a moment she thinks she's gone deaf, because her ears feel like they're filled with hot cotton. She doesn't know what's happened. When she pulls herself to her feet, she sees downed power lines and destroyed gardens outside and not much else.

--

Outside, after picking her way through the contents of the tool shed—now scattered across the yard—she sees the little patch of woodland next to the house completely downed, and she wonders what the _fuck_ did that.

(_Much, much later, when news anchors and small-time scientists have combed her home and her life and her grief for answers, they tell her it was a microburst—two fronts mixing to create an extremely powerful downward blast of air. _But that's so sterilized_, she thinks. _I don't remember it being that clean. _Truth is, though, she doesn't wanna remember at all._)

--

She steps gingerly through the grass, holding a dish towel to her arm. She's intent on reaching the neighbors' house and finding out what just happened. Her brain is conjuring up ideas of nuclear bombs.

She skirts around the doghouse and moans in shock. Missy is crumpled against the side, looking so tiny and so broken. Anna thinks she must've been thrown in the blast. There's something about the darkening blood clotting Missy's sandy-colored fur that dredges up an old uncomfortable half-memory (_something about hair and a car window_), and Anna hastily covers the dog with the already stained towel.

--

She's just leaving the doghouse when she hears a low gurgled sound that makes her skin suddenly cold. Turning towards the fallen trees, she catches a glimpse of blue-plaid workcoat, and something inside her snaps. She runs over, thinking _jesus christ, jesus christ_. She can't help screaming, she can't help it.

_Fool girl, stop your bellowing and _do_ something_, Grandpa used to say whenever she went off the wall like this.

Only he isn't saying it now, Anna thinks hysterically. He isn't saying much of anything from where he's pinned beneath the tree, but she still needs to _do_ something.

--

She tries moving the tree, but she can't even begin to lift it off and there's only more of his blood for her troubles. It takes her a full four minutes to remember the cell phone she always has in her pocket. She whispers _it's gonna be okay_ to the old man and she shakily dials 911.

She sits next to Grandpa as she waits for the ambulance, but she knows he's gone less than three minutes after she shrieks to the dispatcher to _send_ _help, please god, send help, he's dying_.

She sobs gutturally, completely useless and still bleeding.

--

She hears a motor, and she looks up expecting the ambulance. Instead, it's Grandpa's old Cadillac, the one they'd left at the shop last night, being driven past by some wild-eyed dude, apparently town-bound. She realizes with a shock that he's just _stolen_ her grandfather's car. Grandpa's dead (_oh god, no_) and the guy's _stolen_ his _car_.

"Hey!" she screams as she lurches to her feet, all of her terror and grief boiling into rage. "_Hey, you bastard!_"

But he doesn't seem to hear, and he doesn't try to stop.

She's left alone, wondering why the world's gone to hell.


End file.
